Since its first publication in 1985, The Grey Islands has become a classic of Canadian wilderness writing to set beside the works of Thoreau, Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold. Using a broad range of forms and styles - lyric, anecdote, field notes, documents and pseudo-documents, ghost story, tall tale - Steffler relates the story of one man's pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland's northern peninsula. Often comic, and always deeply passionate and sensuous, The Grey Islands tells of t...

Deluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada’s former Parliamentary Poet Laureate.Includes new material. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned ty...

A former Poet Laureate of Canada and finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize returns with a wide-ranging new collection of poems.CBC Best Canadian Poetry of 2020In John Steffler's luminous collection, And Yet, dreams, memory and desire are forms of wilderness that burst into our daily lives, inspiring us to see ourselves and the world anew. Exuberant, powerful, even prescient, the poems confront the unknown and unexpected around and ...

In this series of elegant and wide-ranging meditations on language, wilderness, poetry, and technocracy, John Steffler takes us on a guided tour of one poet’s mental workshop. His focus is vividly personal, shaped by his interests and experience, and at the same time universal. What is it to be human? Steffler is not afraid to be provocative, but he is also compassionately alert to moral, political, and cultural complexity. This is a book that will convince you that poetry can indeed make ...

Deluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada’s former Parliamentary Poet Laureate.Includes new material. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned ty...

A beautiful new edition of the award-winning collection from Canada’s new Poet Laureate.Newfoundland-born poet John Steffler is one of this country’s most accomplished writers. Recently named Canada’s national poet, he is the author of The Grey Islands (poems) and the award-winning novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright, both of which have become classics in our time.That Night We Were Ravenous is Steffler’s most recent b...

The first collection of new poems in more than a decade from one of Canada’s most respected poetsThe poems in John Steffler’s new collection are enlivened by the same muscular acts of attention that characterize his earlier books. As always, his poems inhabit experience fully, senses on high alert, transmitting the abundance and turbulence of physical existence; they are charged with the raw Eros of being. Nowhere is there a more complete nature poet: attuned, robu...

In Hard Light, Michael Crummey retells and reinvents his father's stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery of a half century ago. Speaking through generations of storytellers, he conjures a world of hard toil and heavy weather, shot through with stoicism, grim humour, endurance, and love. This is writing that is supple and charged with intensity, language that vivifies --- electrifies --- whoever and whatever it describes. "Michael Crummey's lucid, dexterous writing shies a...

Patrick Wiseman moved his wife and son back to Newfoundland to start a new Pentecostal church, but when his wife Anne leaves him for a man she meets on Facebook and his son Hab moves in with his girlfriend Natalie—a burgeoning alcoholic with a fiery past—Patrick takes a suicidal leap of faith that brings him face to face with his estranged father Des, a Catholic mystic who might be covering up an old crime. While Patrick wrestles to come to terms with his failed marriage, Hab struggles to ...

Like any young man, Etienne longs for independence and dreams about a bright future. But he’s a Tourangeau, part of a sprawling Quebec family that, though destitute, thrives as insecurely as weeds in a well-tended garden, nurtured by a mother whose abundant love is more than maternal. Then he meets Odile, a beautiful young woman from a good family who inspires Etienne to transform his future into something worthy of her. But, like Romeo and Juliet, their wild, pure love for each other cann...

Marilyn Dumont's Metis heritage offers her challenges that few of us welcome. Here she turns them to opportunities: in a voice that is fierce, direct, and true, she explores and transcends the multiple boundaries imposed by society on the self. She mocks, with exasperation and sly humour, the banal exploitation of Indianness, more-Indian-than-thou oneupmanship, and white condescension and ignorance. She celebrates the person, clearly observing, who defines her own life. These are Indian po...

Brothers Owen and Alex Collins are brought together when mental illness claims their father and sets off a chain reaction of unrelated, heart-breaking events. Both tender and bold in its delivery, Away from Everywhere cuts no corners in telling the story of their crushing childhood, the reasons the brothers become different men, and the unthinkable act of love that tears them apart.